Heatmap, Hot or Not? Free Alternatives for Crazy Egg

Heatmaps are visual representations of data and, in case of websites, point out with which content visitors interact with, how deep a page they scroll, how they move the mouse around the screen, etc. This is done by tracking the mouse clicks and mouse movement of the visitor.

Different heatmaps can be generated, depending on what is being tracked by the tool you use. The most common ones are clicks, movement and scroll depth. Click heatmaps allow you to analyse the clicking behavior, movement heatmaps will show you how people move their mouse over the screen and the scroll depth shows you how far the page people scroll.

As said, heatmaps are just overlays showing you how people interact with your website. Interpreting the results, however, is still up to you.

So that was a small intro on what heatmaps are and how they are being generated. Now let me show you some of the tools! I started out with Crazy Egg a long time ago but have tried several alternatives.

Crazy Egg

A while ago, Crazy Egg was a free service, but that’s not longer the case. They have various payment-options and if you have a look at the demo, you’ll notice that 9$ a month is not that much. If you prefer to have a free alternative for Crazy egg, you can just keep on reading…

I also wrote an extensive review about Crazy Egg if you’re interested in this tool. It includes a link, giving you the opportunity to subscribe for a 60 day free trial.

Hotjar

I have been using Hotjar since the early Beta version and I am actually very happy with it. The tool is really easy to set up and produces useful heatmaps per device (desktop, tablet and mobile phone) and per type (click, move and scroll). This means a nice variety of options to analyse and gain insights from.

But it doesn’t stop there for Hotjar because they offer so much more than heatmaps. Other features include live recordings, funnel analysis, polls, surveys and even live user tests via screen sharing.

Every feature is enabled for the basic (free) account but restricted in use. Really worth your time to check it out.

Mouseflow

Next in line is Mouseflow. Besides a detailed mouse click heatmap, it also offers a mouse movement and scroll heatmap. But it doesn’t stop there.

Mouseflow is in fact a powerful web analytics package that gives you plenty of statistics and features to play around with. It records the pageviews, total visit length, interaction time (which I find very useful), bounce rates, loading time, response time and the scroll reach (in percentages and pixels).

On top of that, Mouseflow offers live streaming, a very nice feature with which you can follow your users live (only for paying subscriptions)! It also records whole visitor sessions, which you can playback in your browser or simply download to your hard drive to watch it whenever you want. These recordings include the mouse movements, clicks, scroll events and key strokes.

For only 10€ a month you get 1000 recorded sessions – which is a bargain – but if you’re still not sure you can always start with a free subscription.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Mouseflow has just released a new version of their tool. Check out the new Mouseflow.

Lucky Orange

Next one is Lucky Orange, which has more features to offer than any other tool mentioned in this list. They have session recordings, heat maps and funnels. On top of that, they have also integrated a live chat functionality, polls and form analytics.

The heat maps are divided into clicks, moves and scroll depth. So what’s so special then? Well, Lucky Orange doesn’t simply take a ‘snapshot’ of your web page but instead creates an interactive overlay as you browse your website. That’s right people. Finally a solution for dynamic content and interactive interfaces! No need to worry about about menus, drop downs or popups any more.

You can easily switch between screen sizes and event types. Filter on behaviour tags (similar behaviour), keywords, source, browser, etc. and create segments for frequently used filter combinations, making it possible to define your personas for example.

Lucky Orange has several pricing plans. Pretty pretty good value for money I might add, but, unfortunately no free subscriptions. However, readers of paulolyslager.com will enjoy a 30 day trial instead of the normal 7 days. Just sign up and they will make the necessary changes for you!

MouseStats

Next one in line is MouseStats, which has several features to offer. They have session playbacks, heatmaps, form analytics and surveys.

The heat maps are divided into clicks, moves, scroll reach, viewport overlap, attention and areastats. The coordinates of the clicks are pretty similar compared to the other tools but they seem somewhat less refined (think bigger blobs).

MouseStats has also included the services of Unbounce, Instapage and Optimizely, giving you the possibility to generate a different heat map per A/B test variant for example.

The session recordings will show you, besides the actual video, the duration of the visit, the amount of pages during the sessions and some other details such as OS, browser, screen size and whether it was a touch device or not. In all honesty, I’ve seen better implementations of this feature.

MouseStats has several paid plans available, but they also offer a free life-time plan. All of the above features are enabled in this free plan, but highly reduced in the amount of recordings.

Ptengine

Ptengine is a complete analytics tool that includes a full heat -and scroll map as well. One of the many great features is that you can differentiate between the interactive and non-interactive elements of your interface when viewing the maps. That’s something I’ve only seen before at Lucky Orange. You can also compare multiple pages with each other. All of this comes with a multi device monitoring.

A great tool that offers so much more than heat maps. If you sign up through our blog, you will receive an extended 2 month trial. This instead to the normal 14 days.

inspectlet

Inspectlet offers 3 bigger features: User session recordings, heat maps and form analytics. All are available within the free plan (although limited), with the exception of the form analytics. The paid plan starts at $39 per month.

The user sessions recording come fully packed. Browser, Screen size, session length, starting page, referrer and enough filters to find what you are looking for. One neat little filter – and I haven’t seen this anywhere else – is the option to find sessions by the caption of any button or link with which the visitor interacted with.

Eye-tracking heatmap: understand where your users are looking and what parts of the site they’re reading by overlaying their mouse movements.

Click heatmap: this type of heatmap is useful for visualizing where your visitors are ultimately clicking.

Scroll heatmap: see how far visitors are scrolling down and what portion of your entire page’s contents they are viewing.

You can also filter for several device types:

Desktop

Tablet

Mobile – Landscape

Mobile – Portrait

All in all, inspectlet is a great tool, giving you all the necessary insights in a blink of an eye. Unfortunately, the recording quota with free plan is a bit on the low side. For example, it will only record 100 user sessions per month.

Continue reading on the second page where you’ll find more alternatives for Crazy Egg.

What you should read next

Paul Olyslager

Paul is the creator, editor and most regular writer of paulolyslager.com. He's also working as UX Lead for Home24, a leading online shop for furniture and home accessories, based in Berlin, Germany. Read all about Paul or find him on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. View other posts by Paul Olyslager.

Subscribe to the UX newsletter

Get the best UX newsletter, full of handpicked articles, resources and ideas delivered right to your inbox every second week.

If the cost-benefit ratio was ok, then this would be a great solution… but only for those websites which attract a lot of visitors. More visitors means more clicks to be recorded, so they would certainly benefit of a second server.

I am new to the world of web analytics and i think the functions are unbeleivable. I have an online private business and it has always been so frustrating to me how i could not observe the activity of my customers. I came accross ClickTale analytics on a similar blog and i tried out the free option offered and my eyes have been opened. I now feel confident to adjust my website according to the behaviour i can see in the videos and all the heatmaps. Its so simple and so effective, I wish i had found it earlier.

Hi, I found your page when i was searching Google for sites related to this article. I have tell you, your site is good. I like the design too, its nice. I don’t have the time at the moment to fully read your website but I have noted it and I also registered for your RSS feed. I will be back in a day or two. Thanks for a great website.

Regarding clickheat – I installed it on the checkout pages of a store to see how people used the page.

A while later the site owner complained that when he viewed the checkout pages he got the IE ‘this page contains secure and insecure content’ error, and he worried that this was reducing the conversion rate. I checked and checked and checked again, and I couldn’t find any non-https images.

Eventually I finally realised what was happening – it was the clickheat script that was the insecure content on the https page!

@Stuart: Hi Stuart, nice to hear that you like this list and thanks for your interesting comment. I’ve been using Clickheat sporadically for a few months now (actually only used it to write this article and test it a bit) and I never crossed this IE error message before. The implemented code from Clickheat seems a bit aggressive and maybe a good thing to keep it out of the secure checkout pages. I can imagine that the CR dropped down a bit because of this message, but maybe you can switch to a less intrusive package. Although I find Clickheat’s system interesting (follow the mousemovements of the visitor), I prefer to use A/B testing in checkout pages to increase the CR.

Interesting article. We have also created our own heatmap service at http://intuitionhq.com, and at $9 a test we think it’s very reasonably priced. We’ve designed it to be simple, quick and easy to use, and we think it works pretty well in that respect.

If you’d like to give it a go, please email me back on this address, or contact us on twitter @intuitionhq – we’d happily set you up with some free tests if you’d like to have a play.

You should try http://mouseflow.com that gives you heatmaps on mouse movements and clicks, but more importantly records whole visitor sessions (including mouse movements, clicks, scroll events and keystrokes) and lets you watch the whole thing in your browser.

@Owen McGab Enaohwo: Hi Owen and thank you for the reply. When I was doing the research for this article I had to know what Crazy Egg was all about in order to form a better opinion. I have to say that Crazy Egg is a very good heatmap system, but nothing more, noting less. For a paying alternative I would recommend Mouseflow because it gives you much more than a heatmap system. The live streaming is a very nice feature but it also provides you with plenty of statistics and a scroll heatmap. Don’t forget to retweet this article to get 500 free recordings :) .

As for a free alternative, I would go with clickdensity. It is similar to Crazy Egg but doesn’t have the nice interface.

@Paul Olyslager: After reading your blog post and asking my previous question, I installed the free Picnet and in a couple of months I will be moving on to Mouseflow (which is subscription based). I even compare Mouseflow to Clicktales and I think Mouseflow provide more bang for less money.

gerorge says

Fantastic article. I have just install mouseflow. I was between mouseflow and clicktale but the price was the main reason i choose mouseflow. My main concern is security. I have install also the proxy.php file in order to track shopping cart etc. How secure is this? Any ideas?

Lasse Schou says

@gerorge: Hi, if your website is running SSL, all data transmitted to Mouseflow is also encrypted. You can even adjust the php proxy script so that it sends data to https://… instead of http://.

If you’re not using SSL then all data is transmitted unencrypted across the network, including the compressed mouseflow data.

If you want more information about Mouseflow security, feel free to post specific questions.

@Ed: Hi Ed, at the time I was writing this post I had ClickTale, Crazy Egg, Mouseflow and Google Analytics running. It didn’t give me any script problems, just make sure that everything works smoothly before you install something else. Loading time could be affected. I hope this answers your question?

Clickheat has been reported to place hidden links on your website, and can cause your site to drop from google rankings. Do a Google search on this, I’ve already found a few articles warning people of this.

I’ve tried mouseflow. Despite giving you an aesthetically pleasing heatmap, the states are extremely misleading and unreliable. I don’t advise it at all.

Clickdensity is crap.

Clicktale is amazing! Tis hands-down the best, but bloody expensive.

I’ve tried picnet before with poor results, but have just decided to give it a second go.

Another one to add to the list is Seevolution, which is new and free at the moment. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it to work properly on my site yet, but I’ll see how things go. (The support team is very helpful btw, but they don’t work weekends :( )

@Sammie Fields: Hi Sammie, could you please elaborate on the misleading and unreliable heatmaps? I’m thinking that you might have a centered website, but haven’t set the alignment and width in the Mouseflow control panel. This may lead to displaced heatmaps. Unfortunately Mouseflow cannot automatically detect the alignment and width of the website.

I totally recommend mouseflow. This real time recording is an amazing feature and gives you real feedback from your visitors. It doesn’t support google maps and a couple of tiny things beacause it’s within other iframes etc. but that’s fair enough. I tried also Seevolution which seems promising but it’s not as helpful as mouseflow can be. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the article.

Ehavior gives you the first 2000 clicks for free so that you can try it out and be convinced.

One of our products prime features is the integration with your Google Analytics account. This allows you to segment your click data by every advanced Google Analytics segment. Some examples of use are: – Evaluate paid (SEM) clicks against non-paid (organic) clicks. – See where visitors that purchased from you clicked. See where those that did not purchase anything clicked. – Evaluate new vs. returning visitors.

The only limitation is your imagination (and the data available in your Google Analytics account :-))…

Thanks for keeping this article updated. I use WordPress and find it seems to have a plugin for almost anything you can think of. These will definitely help me to improve my own website conversions and will be a good addition to my tool kit. Thanks

40-02 says

Try metrika.yandex.com. It is simple and powerful free web analytycs service from Russian Search Engine

thank you for your comment. This article has been written a while ago, so some heatmap applications might have changed their payment options. I will give you a quick overview:

– Feng-Gui is not longer a free service, as stated in the article. Minimum of $2,5 per image. – The first heatmap WordPress-plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years, so I wouldn’t use it anymore. – Clickheat and Corunet are OpenSource software and free of charge. – ClickDensity offers a free trail of 30 days. – Mouseflow has changed their payment options, with €10/month and 30 day money back guarantee. – Picnet only has a free demo, which was mentioned in the original article. – Patrick Wied’s heatmap system is an OpenSource JavaScript library and free of charge.

I hope this list answered your question a bit. At the moment I’m working on a new list, which will include both free and paying services.

I would like to point out that we found Corunet to be a useful solution at some point. It’s pretty flexible, but perhaps it takes a tech savvy person to implement.

Best, Susan of WebMeUp.Com

Ellen L. says

Thanks Paul, you did a really great job here! I personally use a killer combination of Mouseflow and Website Auditor for my projects. First I polish up all on-site optimization aspects, like duplicate content, broken links, code errors, robot.txt, XML sitemap, plus analyze page elements where keywords can be strategically placed (title, headings, ALT text, meta tags)in WebSite Auditor. And then I use Mouseflow do check how fixing on-page issues impacts user behavior. This works all the way around too: if I discover that there are usability problems on site – and this is something MouseFlow is excellent at – I do use WebSite Auditor again to fix them out.

There is a free trial option that allows to test up to for 10 000 pages for free. This particular tool have several benefits that are usually not available in other platforms, including heatmaps for dynamic website elements.

It generates Click Heatmaps and offers Click and Tap Playback! It works with Fluid layouts so it will playback a user session if they are on a Mobile device or desktop computer. If you have media queries that change the layout on the page, when a mobile device hits it, we have a feature where you can enable Dynamic Content on the page and then apply the Heatmap or Play user sessions to reveal hot points on the dynamic elements! Playback of sessions overlays an optional path with arrows (click 1,2,3 etc). There is even an instant playback speed. The Dashboard runs on your site and works on a Smart Phone or Desktop computer. At heatmap.ca there is a page of visual analytics including clicks by Country, State, City, Time of Day, Day of week, Tablets, Phones, etc.

This is not a limited tool…you get 500,000 clicks per month, Unlimited Views, you can monitor 100 pages per month across multiple domains.

On a personal note, I thought it was about time this type of service was available to all small to medium sized businesses as a free service. I am giving something back to the community. Enjoy!

Rob I welcome your feedback and if you have any questions, let me know.

Hotspots User Tracker is a free WordPress plugin which provides heat maps for mouse clicks and touch screen taps. It also caters for responsive web design, difference devices and zoom levels. It’s free, no signup required. All of the data is stored locally in your database.

I used inspectlet.com for heatmap and wepify.com for CMS and they both works great! They have free plan.

Cheers

David says

This is a new software that allows you to have a clear picture of your site. Includes heat maps, exit polls and feedback, online surveys, analysis of funnels and many other features. It is the most complete tool of its kind. Be sure to see it, because they are in pre launch at an incredible Price or even free. http://www.hotjar.com/4652

Hi Paul, nice post! I’d also like to add Decibel Insight (DI) in within the mix. It’s similar to CrazyEgg, but on steroids. We’d love you and everyone else to give it a go for free! Please get in contact for more info :)

Thanks for letting us know about your tool. Would I be able to get a try-out account?

Sarah says

Thanks for sharing! I have just discovered Heatmap software recently and it´s great. In case you are interested Visitlead Live chat also is offering this feature now in conjunction with its real time analytics: https://visitlead.com/features

Marcelo Oliveira says

Why don’t just buy a Heatmap Script or WordPress Plugin. It’s much better then pay other companies per month. I got one here http://goo.gl/nDYhIo

Great article, you should also compare these software to one that are using eye-tracking (www.realeye.io). As far as I know, most of decision making process is happening even before first mouse movement!

Hi Adam, thanks for sharing! I just gave it a first test run and although the results are not 100% accurate it does come pretty close. Will be testing a lot more.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Yay! You've decided to leave a comment. That's fantastic! Please keep in mind that comments are moderated and rel="nofollow" is in use. So, please do not use a spammy keyword or else it will be deleted. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation instead. Thanks for dropping by!